SSH Access

If you have a paid-for PythonAnywhere account, you can access it via SSH. The SSH server for your account depends on which one of our sites you signed up to:

If you're using our global, US-hosted site at www.pythonanywhere.com, then the SSH server's hostname is ssh.pythonanywhere.com
If you're using our EU-hosted site at eu.pythonanywhere.com, then the SSH server's hostname is ssh.eu.pythonanywhere.com

Here's how to use that:

From a command line with the ssh command installed

ssh <username>@<ssh server hostname>

The server's fingerprint is:

MD5:d5:50:bd:8e:23:eb:14:3f:cf:15:87:42:0b:bf:e2:60
SHA256:zy2jmqxNg/fs6tFZK55OjHTI3B2UofzOiUvTPtcX3/Y

NB: <username> is your PythonAnywhere username -- not your email address. It's also case-sensitive, so if your username is "MyUsername", then you have to use that -- "myusername" won't work.

The password is the same password you use to login to the web site.

Passwordless logins¶

You can also use public/private keys to enable passwordless logins via SSH.

Just add your public keys to the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys -- it's a plain-text file with one key per line.

If you don't have a public/private key pair yet, you can generate one by running the following command on your system:

$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/username/.ssh/id_ed25519):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_ed25519.
Your public key has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub.

Running the following command copies the generated keys to the pythonanywhere server:

$ ssh-copy-id <username>@<ssh server hostname>
<username>@<ssh server hostname>'s password:

The next time you use ssh <username>@<ssh server hostname>, your password will not be prompted!

VS code¶

If you're using the VS Code remote development extension to connect via SSH, you'll need to use version 0.107 -- later versions currently do not work.

Debugging¶

Sometimes, for some reason, you may not be able to login using SSH. The starting point to working out what is going wrong is to run:

ssh -v <username>@<ssh server hostname>

If the SSH port appears closed to you, this is likely that you failed to authenticate several times, and your IP has been banned for a little while. This mechanism is necessary to protect the SSH service from hackers hammering the service. So, check your credentials, check the IP address again, and try again a little later (something like an hour later).

Filezilla, etc¶

You can also use SSH access to get files into your account using Filezilla and other similar upload tools. Details here.